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Leadership & Project Management — Table of Contents (TOC)

A brief synopsis & links to my stories about blunders, successes, and overlooked tasks

Synopsis

• Most important story: Don’t YOU be the Cause of a Project Failure (tie) Does your Project Plan include “Post-implementation Adjustments”?
• Most popular: Managers: How do You Manage a Cat?

TOC Methodology

• Medium has made it extremely difficult for a new reader to see your entire portfolio. Even a TOC with all of my articles is long. This post is a sub-category with descriptions and links to my articles.
• Sections: Leadership, Project Management
• Example:

Leadership

• Everybody benefits from good training — the trainee, the instructor, the company, and the company’s customers.
• To be effective, the trainer must put people into real-world situations, but not so large that they are overwhelming.
• Made-up problems do not work well. This article shows how to do that from McDonald’s to computer programmers to managers.

• All projects, from software development to a bathroom remodel, are moving targets.
• Some changes are hardly noticeable, but others can destroy the project or just be constantly frustrating. This article identifies frequent problems and how to meet the challenge.

• My poor managers learned about cats. This article shows managers what to watch for and everybody else can laugh about it.
• They had to put up with me because everybody else was ecstatic with my temperament and work.

• Book reads like a novel instead of a textbook
• Over 90% of first graders are highly creative, less than 10% by graduation
• Creativity applies to every aspect of life, not just art, music, and inventions

• The website said the item was located at z21
• z21 did not exist

• Many seemingly unrelated things actually have something in common. That’s why so many cartoons and jokes are funny when the connection is pointed out.
• This restaurant bathroom and the computer project are no different.

• Management can be blind! Some pay attention to the wrong things; others are just too arrogant!
• Every job has customers: the programmer writing internal systems, the maid in a hotel, or the person selling cars.
• Restaurants provide a microcosm for all businesses, large and small.

• Usually, management tries to maximize profits, the golden eggs.
• However, it will eventually become counterproductive to squeeze out every last cent. That can irritate your goose.

• Examples of how not to handle a news conference.
• Ways to fix the most glaring mistakes for any news conference

Project Management

• I have never had a project that I was personally in charge of fail from 1969 to the present.
• The average failure rate for new projects is 14% according to CIO magazine. Here are 3 IT examples plus one other reason that occurs everywhere.
• Managers: Always be careful what you say

• Nothing goes perfectly. A recent upgrade of Medium.com demonstrated that.
• You must be ready when things don’t go as expected. Even more important, you must prepare your customers for such events.
• How to prepare customers and your management. You want to appear proactive, not reactive.

• You, the app user: should not notice a significant difference, except more and better new features, and maybe better response time. The app certainly should not break, especially on actions that were already part of the app.
• You, the app provider: all the new features work, no existing features break, and important features do not disappear. If you made a mistake, you might have a million witnesses who are upset with you…

• Small internal projects pull large projects together and support daily operations. They make people’s lives easier and can potentially have a huge impact on the bottom line.
• This concept applies to ALL projects, not just computer apps.

• Some messages clear to the programmer are meaningless to the user

• This shows how easy it is to break even the most dynamic software with an upgrade.
• It would not allow new posts with Illumination publication links and deleted all existing posts. It took a while to fix it.

• It was my last quarter. I had a job waiting, no more money and no more time.
• Solutions are not always obvious.

• Don’t follow the stereotype during the remodel, although 80,000+ houses in The Villages, FL have one type of bathroom mirror.

Author’s Story

Table of Contents (all stories)

• Category links (current & short)

• Through April, 2021
• A synopsis may be added to the sub-category story, but not included in the full TOC due to length.